GLASS-MAKING. 157 



material and ugly. It is not a beautiful or an inspiring thing to 

 blow bottles all day long, unless one does it remarkably well ; but 

 the industry remaining, the life in these towns might still be 

 made much less bare than it is, could that gospel of happiness and 

 culture which Mr. Walter Besant and others are preaching in the 

 East End of London find here some good apostle who would make 

 it the burden of a new evangel. 



In the larger bottle- works there are generally several melting 

 furnaces, but each is complete in itself, a unit from which a larger 

 or smaller plant may be constructed, according to the require- 

 ments of the case. Each furnace is lodged in its own building. 

 A certain symmetry is loaned to these low, rectangular wooden 

 structures by the tall brick furnace-shaft which rises through the 

 center of the roof, and by the numerous smaller chimneys scat- 

 tered around the edge. The sides of the building are movable on 

 pivots, and when open give the factory somewhat the appearance 

 of the Japanese houses pictured by Mr. Morse. 



Inside of the factory all is life and movement. But, amid the 

 dirt and confusion which characterize such an interior, there are 

 the order of active money-getting and the beauty of a long-prac- 

 ticed dexterity. 



If one follow the crude materials from the time they enter the 

 building until they finally emerge in the form of many-shaped 

 bottles, he will begin his inspection at the mixing-room, where the 

 questions of content and proportion are decided. Large wooden 

 wheelbarrows come and go, stopping long enough only to have 

 their weight taken, and to dump their thoroughly ground contents 

 into one of the bins on the side of the room. Patient old men, 

 with hoe and shovel, mechanically mix together the stuff for the 

 " batch/' This varies in its composition according to the sort of 

 bottles that are to be made. Three grades of bottle glass are rec- 

 ognized. The ordinary green glass is obtained from a mixture 

 of about thirty-eight parts of soda and twenty parts of marble- 

 dust to every hundred parts of sand. The glass is essentially a 

 lime-soda glass, not dissimilar to window glass in its composition. 

 The sand used comes from the neighborhood, and contains a 

 little iron. As no bleaching agents are employed, this gives the 

 glass its characteristic light green color the bottle-green of our 

 colorists. The second grade, the amber glass, has about the same 

 composition, only it is colored by the addition of a little ground 

 coke, black-lead, or some other form of carbon, about eight ounces 

 to every hundred pounds of sand. This makes a much less in- 

 nocent-looking bottle than the sea-green tint of the first glass. 

 The finest grade, the so-called flint glass, contains about the same 

 ingredients as the ordinary bottle glass, but the materials used 

 are purer, and some such bleaching agent as manganese dioxide, 



